I was trying out zsh and changed back to bash logged out then my user was gone in my login manager, switched ttys tried logging in that way kept getting invalid login, I am in a live and my passwd in the system still shows me as there.

nope stated that. root and my user give me invalid login. as because root doen't log in brought me to wondering if this is anything like Ubunututututu, where root user is hidden and needs to have a passwd established after install. if you do not understand what that is don'r worry about it.

yeaaahhhh I was thinking chroot but install grub is all I've ever done with it, so I am not too expert-y on this. I'll give it a go, thanks for the instructions. it was late last night when I posted this..
okay
that's it, no mounting everything then chroot, just them two commands?
so what is that a script that does the command for ya?

it half worked, I had to mount my seperate partition for /home create a dir for user chown etc.. it was ok.. but I decided to re-install anyways, and now that I am re-installed I check logging in as root on a different tty and I get login invalid, I did this

I am talking about root user in an installed system, had I had that, I might have been able to fix it. nevertheless, I really like to have root user so I can log in if needed to fix things as root user, not user sudo su to get root.